What has really happened since that last post is that I have become aware of the proximity of the last post. By this I do not mean Brexit: Brexit is merely a forlorn, hopeless cry in the wilderness. We shall not defeat capitalism through Brexit, any more than we could ever have defeated the EU through exposure of the multinational banking interests on which it was founded. Neither is the last post an apocalyptic thought; rather, it is strung between the global and the local – between on the one hand the mourning for civilisation that must attend on the current behaviour of the populations of western democracies, and on the other as I watch the dreary assortment of adverts and self-promotions that drops through my (postal) letter box each day in a steady drizzle of the unwanted.
And so is this, now, how we must post? With an awareness of the sinking of the mail-ship, with a simultaneous awareness of why sub-postmasters are being coerced, suborned, by business? Yes, I suppose so, but all this panoply of the post (post-modernism, post-colonialism, post-post-modernism, meta-post-modernism, post-apocalypticism, and so on and on into an apparently absent future) seems repeatedly to beg the question that nobody addresses – what about the ‘pre’? Yes, I suppose we might be in a pre-post-anthropocene condition, but foes this mean anything? Let us celebrate the ‘pre’, the prior, the impossibility of conceiving of beginnings; let us, with Bruna and my other late friends (my friends, I find, are increasingly always late), remember the Institute for Resistance to Contentment. No doubt some a nniversary is coming round, it always is; but to celebrate it would smack far too greatly of contentment.
It is never too late for subscriptions to the IRC, although in other ways it may seem to be many years too late; but in many case, money, as Marx said, is no object.
Stick with me here; this might be a difficult few months, and I have friends to rescue from a land to which nobody but me has the key (I understand my old comrade Yves Tanguy lost his skeleton some time ago).
David Punter 